Farewell to Android
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What is Twitter?So you've upgraded to Lion, got all excited, but then found that important applications like Microsoft Office and Adobe Flash aren't working properly. We did try and warn you but don't worry - bugs like this are normal with a new OS release and updates will surely be released in the next few weeks and months to fix them. However, if Lion is making your life hell, you can always downgrade back to Snow Leopard in a few simple steps.
1. Backup your files to an external drive
Make sure you've got a backup of your files using a tool such as Time Machine, SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner. If the last time you backed-up on Time Machine was with Snow Leopard, your life will be a bit easier. If you've overwirtten it since then with a Lion backup however, you'll find that you can't restore a Lion Time Machine backup in Snow Leopard because of comptability problems. In this case, just drag your user folder (Macintosh HD/Users) from Lion into an external drive and then you can just drag it back into Snow Leopard. Note that it's important to backup to an external drive because shortly, you'll be wiping your hard drive.
2. Boot from a Snow Leopard Disk
Insert the Snow Leopard disk. Shut-down your Mac, switch it back on and hold down the "Option" key and select Snow Leopard.
3. Erase your hard drive
Use Disk Utility to erase your Hard Drive completely. This is to prevent any conflict that may occur by installing Snow Leopard over Lion.
4. Install Snow Leopard
Using the OS X Installer, install Snow Leopard onto your new clean hard drive.
5. Restore your files and folders from your backup drive
Restart your Mac, connect your backup external hard drive and use your backup program to restore your files and folders to Snow Leopard.
This is the most simple method and the last step will depend on which program you used to backup your files. Note that even though this is a clean install, you may experience issues with some files, folders and applications if you modified or updated them in Lion.
Why would you want to downgrade from lion.. the features it provides are way better..especially "wife mode" its my term for one of the privacy features;).
If anyone wants to know about any other great features of the lion here is another article: http://v12ntoday.com/news/news-news/apple-os-x-lion-to-offer-mac-users-more-virtualization-options.html
I tried this, but snow leopard can't read the Time Machine back-up I made in Lion. It says I need to upgrade my OS (back to Lion) first. Any ideas?
@Anonymous, Sorry maybe I should have been clearer. I've added the following explanation - hope it helps!
If I had a time machine backup since I installed lion and I clean install back to snow leopard, can I just choose an older backup from the list or are all of my backups dependent on lion now?
@Matt, Unfortunately I don't think you can. Once Time Machine has been used on Lion, backups are not backward compatible. More details about this can be found here.
Can I go from 10.4.11 to snow leopard? Will I have trouble with any current programs?
@janet, Yes you can but you should definitely backup everything before doing so with an app like SuperDuper. The jump from Tiger to Snow Leopard is quite big though and you may find that some programs need updating before they will work on Snow Leopard.